Hitler's Terror Weapons

by Brooks, Geoffrey

  It seemed to be the purpose of these mysterious objects to fly in parallel formation with the reporting aircraft and hover at wingtips. USAF pilot Wendell C. Stevens remembers:

  “They were a greyish-green or red-orange colour. They would approach to within about five metres from the aircraft and stay there. They could not be shaken off nor shot down.”

  Initially pilots were reluctant to submit reports for fear of ridicule or grounding for psychiatric reasons, but eventually there were hundreds of sightings, and it would seem that between November 1944 and January 1945 every pilot in the American 415th Night Fighter Squadron had seen the phenomenon at least once.

  Lts David McFalls and Edward Baker, veterans of the squadron, stated that at 1800 hrs on 22 December 1944 at an altitude of 10,000 feet over Hagenau in the Lorraine area they observed two large orange glows ascending towards them:

  “Upon reaching our altitude the objects levelled off and stayed on our tail. I went into a steep dive and the glows followed in sharp precision. I banked as sharply as I dared and the objects followed. For two minutes the lights stalked me through several intricate maneouvres, peeled off under perfect control, then blinked out.”

  In a heavily censored Associated Press release of 13 December 1944, which was nine days before the Hagenau sighting, Allied pilots reported seeing over the Reich “mysterious silvery balls” which just “floated in the air” singly and in clusters. B-17 pilot Charles Ogden, who had seen them over Germany, described them as “crystal balls, about the size of a basketball” which would approach to within 300 feet of the bomber formation and then “seem to become magnetized and fly alongside”. After a while they would “peel off like a plane and leave”. Although seen mostly at night, some airmen reported them during daylight hours. Another 415th Squadron pilot said,

  “… the lights would tail the aircraft for a few moments before streaking away. They never showed up on radar but experienced crews discounted explanations such as reflections, St Elmo’s fire and flares, all of which were easily recognizable.”

  The most striking effect of closeness to these objects was electro-magnetic and they do not seem to have been detectable on radar. One gained the impression that they might be being handled remotely, as was reported over the Rhine Valley one evening in December 1944 when Lt Henry Gibbin and his radar observer Lt Walter Cleary sighted:

  “… a huge red light 1000 feet above us (we were at 1000 feet ourselves). The object was moving at about 200 mph. At the same time other crews reported a glowing red object which shot up vertically, turned over and plunged into a steep dive. It seemed under intelligent control.”

  It was suspected that the aerobatic fireballs were a German anti-aircraft weapon to foul ignitions and interfere with radar, but if so they appeared ineffective and in any case captured German pilots also reported being harassed by them. As the fireballs did not seem to do anything very hostile except manouevre close to an aircraft, it was assumed that they represented the experimental stage of a new weapon.

  After they peeled away and plunged into a steep dive, what did they do next? On 25 March 1945 elements of the Sixth Armoured Division dug in south of Darmstadt overlooking the autobahn saw:

  “… six or seven bright yellow-orange circular objects approach the autobahn from the west at an altitude of about 150 feet. They were not travelling in formation but moving in the same general direction. Each had its own distinct erratic movement as if individually controlled. They were three to four feet in diameter and so bright that they illuminated trees around them. They descended slowly at about 10 mph until entering deep into the forest, where they disappeared.”

  These balls of fire were also reported from the Pacific during and after the war. Author Leonard Stringfield, while piloting a 5th Air Force C-46 near Iwo Jima on 28 August 1945, described how the aircraft developed serious engine trouble when approached by:

  “three unidentifiable blobs of brilliant white light, each about the size of a dime held about arm’s length. The blobs were travelling in a straight line through drifts of cloud, seemingly parallel to the C-46 and equal to its speed.”

  From 1942 onwards German naval forces had large U-boat and transport bases on the coasts of Malaya, Indonesia and Singapore as well as mainland Japan, which could explain the origin of various wartime sightings in the region.

  How Did the Feuerkugel Work?

  In the normal course of events the British authorities were due to release the Kugelblitz/Feuerkugel papers in 1975. The failure to declassify reports about strange enemy weapons developments at the thirty-year mark is obviously a bad sign. The so-called ‘foo-fighter’ was a small German aerial machine which appeared to do nothing except change its shape in flight, after which it was invisible to radar and could not be shot down. This is a characteristic of UFOs, and as the existence of UFOs is denied by Governments in London and Washington, logically it should be perfectly harmless to release the papers.

  To illustrate the similarity between UFO and Flying Turtle reports, I have selected just four examples from the hundreds of thousands of UFO reports made postwar.

  (1) On the night of 12 June 1964 the police chief of Elmore, Ohio, while on patrol noticed a brilliant light, with an aura around it which extended for a quarter mile in all directions, hovering at about 2000 feet to the side of State Route 5. It was impossible to make out a distinct outline for the object, only that it was a “fuzzy ball of light with a large aura”. Together with three other officers, he kept watch. The object made towards them and as it approached it grew in brightness and size, changing from a nondescript glow into the firm form of a flying ‘V’ and passing overhead at 500 feet. While the object was quiescent and hovering it had an indistinct glowing spherical form; when it left it transformed into a wedge shape. The hypothesis in this case is that the object re-entered this dimension in order to make its departure at speed.

  (2) RAF Pilot Robert Pilkington stated that while flying a Vampire-5 fighter for 601 Squadron out of North Weald, Essex, on exercise in 1952 he was vectored to intercept a multi-coloured large sausage-like object at 30,000 feet. Upon his approach it changed from a sausage into a flying saucer and left at high speed – “that is to say the human eye assumed it changed shape,” he added. The hypothesis in this case is that the object re-entered this dimension for a hasty departure.

  (3) While en route to the Iwo Jima campaign, the US battleship New York (Rear Admiral Kemp C. Christian) and her destroyer escorts sighted overhead a silver sphere “about the size of a house.”156 After some discussion on the bridge the officers agreed it must be a gigantic Japanese balloon. The optical rangefinders calculated the distance as 1700 yards and the 3-inch anti-aircraft battery opened fire. Shortly afterwards the destroyer escort also began a cannonade with their 5-inch main armament. It was found impossible to hit the strange object and eventually the group abandoned the attempt and continued with their voyage. Later the US Navy offered the usual explanation that all these warships had been firing at Venus. This is pure nonsense. Naval rangefinders are either stereoscopic or work on mathematical calculations from target triangulation. In this case it was established by measurement that the object was occupying a definite geographical location in this dimension about three miles up and the guns were ranged on it. If by some mischance the battleship’s gunnery officers had mistaken Venus, which is several hundred million miles away, for a balloon the size of a house hovering overhead, they would have been advised immediately of the fact by their data control centres. The nature of the problem being encountered by the gunnery officers, whether the projectiles were being ricocheted when they hit the target or were deflected by some sort of force field protecting it, was not mentioned by the crewmen reporting the incident. This balloon seems to have been hovering in the adjacent dimension where it would be invulnerable.

  (4) The SS Naviero was an ex-Liberty freighter of the Argentine Shipping Lines. She had a cargo of explosives and gunpowder, and for that reason a very good w
atch was being kept. Her officers and crew were summoned on deck on the morning of 20 July 1967 off the coast of Brazil to see a powerfully glowing object in the sea not more than 15 metres away. It was cigar-shaped, 100 feet in length and had no external control surfaces or protruding parts. It made no noise and left no wake in the water. After a while it suddenly dived and headed off rapidly at very high speed. This sausage-like submersible had a measureable geographical location, was even visible optically in two media, air and water, but was not tangible enough to leave a wake.

  In two of the above cases the presence of the UFO in question varied between being physical and paraphysical at different times: the other two were paraphysical throughout the encounter. It may now be becoming clearer why London and Washington will not even hypothesize the existence of UFOs for discussion. Late in 1942, at the stage of the conflict when the German leadership had accepted that the planned objectives of the war were no longer unattainable, the Waffen-SS began trying out aerial machines which acted just like the four mysterious vehicles quoted above. Who in London would want to talk about the implications of that?

  The Kugelblitz/Feuerkugel was an experimental stage of the German flying disc project. What must have been learned by chasing and homing-in on Allied aircraft across another dimension over Reich and Axis Pacific airspace during 1943 and 1944 was to be put into practice aboard the real thing at a later time. Meanwhile German aeronautical engineers had worked around the clock on the project for which the Foo Fighters were the preliminary stage and next came the search for the perfect aerodynamic shape.

  Germany was the world pioneer in helicopter development and in 1942 the Flettner 282 Kolibri became the first helicopter anywhere to enter operational military service. It was the most advanced orthodox helicopter development of the war. The German supersonic helicopter had a system in which the fuel was piped to combustion chambers at the rotor bladetips where it exploded, whirling the blades around at a fantastic speed.158

  Germany thus led the world in helicopter knowledge and design.

  Within thirty months from July 1942 German aeronautical engineers designed and built several giant circular aircraft which were basically sophisticated autogyros and first flew in early 1945.

  The 1919 Treaty of Versailles had so drastically restricted German aircraft production that glider flying became important for pilot training and research. The Horten brothers transformed the living room of their parents’ house into a workshop and in 1933 test-flew their first glider, Ho I, at Bonn-Hagelar. All three brothers were Luftwaffe officers and Nazi Party members. During the Battle of Britain their Ho II and Ho III designs formed part of a special glider unit for Operation Sea Lion. In 1942 at the request of the Luftwaffe they built a stronger and larger version of the Ho V to take a Schmitt-Argus pulse-jet. The variant was designated Ho VII. At about the same time as Schriever’s autogyro blueprint, they were designing a strange crescent-shaped glider, the Ho VI Parabola. Everything regarding this development was destroyed in a mysterious fire at Hellegenberg that year and we hear no more about it until 1947, when the USAF were most anxious to interview Reimar Horten, who by then had escaped to Argentina and was unfortunately incommunicado.

  CHAPTER 16

  German Flying Crescents and Discs

  THE FLYING DISC Project in Hitler’s Germany was one of three most secret research programmes and was classified Geheime Reichssache, the highest possible top secret. Nowhere, in any academic history of the Second World War, nor in any memoir of a military or political leader of any of the nations involved, Allied or German, will the researcher find the mention of a German flying disc. It is as if the project never existed. Here is the greatest mystery of the Second World War: why a flying vehicle held in such low regard for modern commercial and military purposes should have merited not only Hitler’s but, postwar, the Allies’ highest secrecy rating for it. Very recently the CIA archive has released documents full of accounts by German engineers of their work on circular aircraft capable of astonishing speeds, but useful information on the craft themselves remains elusive.

  Had it not been for the spate of UFO sightings by US Air Force personnel over a twelve-day period in 1947 which led the US Army and Air Force to mount a combined project to investigate the phenomenon, the existence of the documentary evidence for the German project would have remained a secret in perpetuity. The confirmatory paper was not declassified until 1969, and only then as an appendix to a fatuous report of 964 pages issued by a University of Colorado committee under the chairmanship of Dr Edward U. Condon, and under contract to the Office of Scientific and Technical Research of the US Air Force.159 This outfit spent two years and $600,000 of US Air Force appropriation to conduct an in-depth investigation of the UFO problem. The study was a total farce and, while having nothing useful to say about UFOs, it did, unintentionally one suspects, confirm the existence of a successful Nazi flying disc programme, and so was not a complete waste of time and money.

  The official report prepared on 23 September 1947 remained classified until 8 January 1969 when it was published as Appendix R to the Condon Report. The matter enquired into had begun on the night of 28 June 1947 when two pilots and two intelligence officers at Maxwell Air Force base watched an illuminated UFO perform “impossible aerobatics”. On 29 June a naval rocketry expert watched a silvery disc above the White Sands Testing Grounds. On 8 July three officers at the Muroc supersecret USAF test centre in the Mojave Desert reported three silver-coloured objects heading westwards, and ten minutes later a pilot test flying the new XP-84 reported a yellowish-white spherical object resembling nothing being currently tested or flown heading west into the wind at a fantastic speed. Two hours later a crew of technicians filed a report regarding an object interfering with a seat ejection experiment at 20,000 feet. It appeared to be of white aluminium oval construction with two projections on the upper surface which might have been fins. These crossed each other at intervals suggesting slow rotation or oscillation. No obvious means of propulsion was seen. The following day an F-51 pilot at 20,000 feet about 40 miles south of Munroc sighted a flat object of light-reflecting nature with no vertical fin or wings. He attempted to pursue but it outclimbed him.160

  This investigation concluded that UFOs are real and not visionary or fictitious. The objects reported on by USAF personnel were the shape of a disc and as large as a man-made aircraft. Reported operating characteristics such as extreme rates of climb and manoeuvrability (particularly roll) lent possibility to the idea that some of the objects were controlled either manually, automatically or remotely. They had a metallic or light-reflecting surface, showed an absence of trail except in a few instances when the object was apparently operating under high performance conditions, were circular or elliptical in shape, flat on the bottom and domed on top, maintained formations in flights varying from three to nine objects, had no associated sound except in three instances when a rumbling roar was heard, and cruised at above 300 knots.

  This is the US Air Force describing UFOs in flight, quite a contrast to the usual official type of opinion released to the public. The signatory to the report, Lt Gen Nathan Twining, Commanding General, Air Material Command, stated that:

  “It is possible within the present US knowledge – provided extensive detailed development is undertaken - to construct a piloted aircraft which has the general description of the objects in the sub–paragraphs above, which would be capable of an approximate range of 7000 miles at sub-sonic speeds. Any developments would be extremely expensive, time-consuming and at the considerable expense of current projects…”

  Thus it seems that the USAF had no knowledge of domestic flying disc construction by the United States, nor was it particularly keen to get involved in it.

  On the afternoon of 24 June 1947, while en route to Yakima, Washington, private pilot Kenneth Arnold saw a formation of nine bright objects flying south from Mount Baker towards Mount Rainier (about 130 miles apart). The leader was higher than the rest and they
were flying diagonally in an echelon with a larger gap between the first four and the last five. Arnold assumed they were jets, but he could see no tailplanes. He calculated their speed over a 50-mile distance between two elevations as 1700 mph. They were next “in a chain in the neighbourhood of five miles long, swerving in and out of the smaller peaks, flipping from side to side in unison, dipping and presenting their lateral surfaces”. Eight of the objects looked like flat discs, the other, larger than the rest, resembled a crescent. The following day in a newspaper interview, Arnold likened the objects’ movements to “a flat rock bouncing up and down as it skipped across water”. He was subsequently misquoted and later asserted, “the objects were not saucer-shaped but flew erratic, like a saucer if you skip it across water. They were not circular but reporters misunderstood the term”. Dr Jacqueline Mitton of the Royal Astronomical Society, a firm disbeliever in UFOs, agreed that “Arnold’s original drawings were much more a kind of boomerang shape”. Arnold’s description of the leader, the flying crescent, coincides very exactly with an object reported on numerous occasions by USAF pilots and scientists.

  A secret Draft of Collection Memorandum signed by Brig-Gen G. F. Schulgen for the Air Intelligence Requirements Division on 30 October 1947 stated that the alleged flying saucer-type aircraft in which the USAF was interested approximated the shape of a disc and had been reported by many competent observers, including USAF rated officers, from widely scattered places such as the USA, Canada, Hungary, Guam and Japan, both from the ground and from the air. The object had a relatively flat bottom with extreme light reflecting ability. Its plan form approximated an oval or a disc with a dome shape on the top surface, about the size of a C-54 or Constellation aircraft. It was silent except for an occasional roar when operating under super performance conditions. It left no exhaust except occasionally a bluish Diesel-type trail which persisted in the atmosphere for about an hour. Other reports mentioned a brownish smoke trail which could be from a special catalyst for extra power. It had extreme manoeuvrability and the apparent ability to almost hover: it could disappear quickly at high speed or dematerialize, and to suddenly appear without warning as if from extremely high altitude. Several of the craft formed a tight formation quickly and evasive tactics indicated possibly manual or remote control. Under certain power conditions, the craft seemed able to cut a half-mile-wide path through cloud, but this was only seen once.